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Stoke-On-Trent (Uk) Policy Brief #4 • Liveability

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Stoke-On-Trent (Uk) Policy Brief #4 • Liveability STOKE-ON-TRENT (UK) POLICY BRIEF #4 • LIVEABILITY EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This policy brief showcases a successful initiative to improve urban liveability in a shrinking city through repurposing its historical heritage. It shows how old industrial buildings could be used to accommodate new creative arts entrepreneurs and host high profile cultural events. The brief focusses on Spode Works, a 10-acre bone china pottery and homewares production site located in Stoke-on-Trent – a medium-size polycentric industrial city in central England1, coping with population loss. Building on local knowledge and stakeholders’ experiences of using the Spode site after the factory’s closure in 2009, this brief demonstrates how a shrinking city can challenge a negative stereotype, raise its profile, and improve attractiveness by generating new creative arts and culture dynamics from within the effectively repurposed old industrial assets. The key lesson learnt is that to enhance liveability one should not drive it down to specific concerns like housing, jobs, or leisure. Urban liveability is about the dynamism and wider significance of a place. These qualities can be improved by a visionary local authority, enthusiastic civil society, and risk-taking private sector partners, all committed to urban regeneration and raising the city profile through the development of local creative capacity for impactful events and knowledge exchange. INTRODUCTION Over the last two decades, Stoke-on-Trent actors have undertaken a series of initiatives aimed at making the city more attractive and liveable, including improvements in the social and private sector housing provision, tourist infrastructure developments, and civic-led creative arts projects. The local art and culture community and other stakeholders have acknowledged the city’s untapped potential for creativity and innovation. Building on the rich fabric of community life in the Potteries, several community-led projects2 have been very successful in renewing the creative arts dynamic of Stoke-on-Trent and strengthening the city’s importance within the broader national cultural landscape. These initiatives have ranged from grassroots festivals, neighbourhood lantern parades, and the restoration of green spaces and water canals, to creative consultations, civic pride celebrations, drama, performance, outdoor and indoor installation art.3 Amongst the most successful ideas that the local art and culture community in the Potteries has worked hard to make happen involves reusing and repurposing redundant industrial 1 Stoke-on-Trent (pop. 255,833) is a local authority created in 1910 through federation of six historical towns – The Potteries – including Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton, and Longton, with an area of 36 square miles [93 km2]. The municipality was granted city status in 1925 by King George V during a personal visit to emphasise its importance as the centre of the china and pottery industry. 2 E.g., see B Arts (2020) at https://www.b-arts.org.uk/core-work. 3 B Arts (2020). ‘Grassroots Festival’, https://www.b-arts.org.uk/grassroots-festival; ‘Creative Consultation’, https://www.b- arts.org.uk/creative-consultation; ‘Outdoor Art’, https://www.b-arts.org.uk/outdoor-art. This project is funded by the Joint Programming Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe jpi-urbaneurope.eu/project/3s-recipe 2 and retail spaces, buildings, and shop floors for the production, exhibition, and consumption of creative arts (Ault, 2019). IMPROVING URBAN LIVEABILITY THROUGH CREATIVE ARTS AND CULTURE In 2009, the Josiah Spode’s historic Spode factory – the birthplace of fine bone china (c. 1770) – closed its gates for good. The bankruptcy of operating company Royal Worcester and Spode left Award 2015, China Halls, Spode Works. Photo © Joel Fildes for British Ceramics Biennial 400 people out of work and a vast (10 acres / 4 ha) brownfield site, located next door to the Stoke-on-Trent City Council headquarters, to deal with. With the help of local design and creative arts professionals, and other stakeholders, including the local authority, an idea of a festival was launched to celebrate contemporary ceramics from across the world to be hosted in the heart of the world’s ceramics industry. The British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) first took place in 2009, set at Spode in the China Halls, and expanding to various established venues and non-traditional spaces across the city. It returned in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017, and was back in 2019 for the sixth time. Over the first decade of its existence, BCB has built up a programme of projects of artists’ residencies, fellowships, commissions, educational, and enterprise projects running year round. In general, the festival serves as a catalyst for regeneration in the region and a platform for innovation and excellence celebrating the best in current ceramic practices. With the help of The Clay Foundation, a registered charity, it is run by a team of arts and creative practitioners in partnership with a range of other creative, cultural, educational, business, and community organisations across the city.4 Utilising the success of the BCB 2009, the local arts and culture community has been able to attract funding from a series of national and European government-funded bodies and philanthropic charitable organisations (including Art Council England, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Tudor Trust, the Foyle Foundation, the City of Stoke-on-Trent Council, the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, YMCA, BBC Children in Need, Co-op Foundation, Paul Hamlyn Foundation, and The Geoff Herrington Foundation) to support and further expand its activities aimed at making Stoke-on-Trent a more interesting place to live, work, and play through arts and culture events in redundant buildings and spaces. Capitalising on the success of the British Ceramics Biennial, B Arts, a participatory arts company based in North Staffordshire, together with seven other organisations, has consequently run Artcity – a five-year project 4 BCB (2020). ‘British Ceramics Biennial’, https://www.britishceramicsbiennial.com/. Contact Dr. Vlad Mykhnenko (University of Oxford) [email protected] 01865 280767 3 aimed at: i) creating opportunities that could draw artists to live, work and show work in Stoke-on-Trent; ii) providing promising young local artists with a reason to remain in the Potteries; and iii) helping create a new positive narrative for Stoke- on-Trent, built on its cultural life and creative past, present and future. Developed with the support of Arts Council England, AirSpace Gallery, B Arts, Bitjam, Cultural Sisters, Letting in the Light, PiCL, and Restoke, Artcity has been successful in bringing life back to Stoke-on-Trent’s disused industrial spaces with artistic events and exhibitions. The programme has also opened up ‘meanwhile’, Etruria Canals Festival is the area’s largest celebration of canals and canal abandoned, and non-arts spaces heritage (on the left, see photo © Natalie Willatt for B Arts, 2018). across the Potteries for temporary use by artists.5 ArtCity has enabled artistic activity and reuse of various redundant spaces, including gardens, canals, and empty shops, in an effort to encourage arts graduate retention and urban renewal. Noticeably, during its duration in 2014-2019, the programme faced a major challenge in delivering the long-term objective to increase arts graduate retention. The time of great fiscal austerity, which followed in the UK the global financial crisis of 2007-08, has been characterised by a steady decline in the overall number of students choosing higher education, in general, across the Potteries conurbation. Over the last five years (for which the data are available), the absolute number of undergraduate students from Stoke-on-Trent entering higher education decreased by 18%, from 6,772 (2010-11) to 5,562 (2015-16). Moreover, the number of undergraduates remaining to study at home, in the two local universities , decreased by 33%, from 2,960 in 2010-11 to 1,994 in 2015-16. By striking contrast, during Artcity, the share of local creative arts and design undergraduates (domiciled in Stoke-on- Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme), who chose to study locally at Staffordshire and Keele Universities, increased from 36.5% in 2013-14 to 37.8% in 2015-16. ‘Arts, entertainment, and recreation’, as a whole, have become the fourth most popular graduate employment sector in the city, following healthcare, education, and retail. The number of successful local grant applications to Arts Council England has more than doubled, from 8 in 2013-14 to 20 in 2016- 17, with the total grant capture increasing during this period from £234,238 to £487,304. The number of new and existing arts companies registered in Stoke-on-Trent with the Companies House has also been rapidly growing, from 4 in 2013-14 to 22 in 2016-17. Local arts company turnover data have also reported the rapid rise in total turnover from £4,541,714 in 2013-14 to £8,309,371 in 2015-16. EFFECTIVELY REPURPOSING INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE: PRACTICAL MECHANISMS To identify the practical mechanisms driving successful repurposing of Spode Works, we have used a distinctive in- house Urban Futures Method designed to facilitate stakeholders’ collective reflection on and learning about this particular smart shrinkage solution, its benefits, and necessary conditions for effective urban regeneration (Lombardi et al, 2012). During a special Urban Futures workshop on 12 March 2019, hosted by B Arts in Stoke, the local actors involved
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